Subtitles of the Movie

Let's finish out this discussion of using and manipulating pages in Visio 2007 by considering the dedicated hyperlink shapes in Visio. Now, what I've shown you so far about hyperlinks isn't entirely intuitively obvious. I mean, placing a hyperlink on a shape would lead probably, I'd dare say, most users to never use the hyperlink simply because they wouldn't know what to do; namely, number one, hovering over the shape until you see the hyperlink attached and then right clicking the shape and then choosing the hyperlink, which has a really wacky name, dollars to donuts. So if we choose the borders and titles stencil; remember, there's a few different ways to do that, one of which is to open up file, come down to shapes, scroll on over and down to Visio extras and then clicking borders and titles. In there we'll see a handful of dedicated hyperlink buttons. You see there's one and then are two hyperlink circles. I'm going to drag hyperlink circle two out onto the page and as soon as you let it go, we get the hyperlinks dialog box. Now, I want to show the difference between the address field and the sub address field. If we want to link to another Visio diagram or another drawing file, a vsd file, we would place our cursor in address and then click browse. You'll notice that browse actually opens a sub menu where we can put in a world-wide web or an ftp address or we can select local file to browse to another Visio file on our computer or a remote computer on our network. Let me connect this to the fluid power diagram by double clicking it. We can then click OK and we have ourselves a hyperlink. Now, we can resize this. You notice that you can come to the free-rotate handle, swivel it around if you don't like the direction the arrow is going or you can caption it. Open the fluid diagram. Ok? It's hard to see at this zoom level. I understand, but the bottom line is the link still works the same way that we normally work with hyperlinks. We right click the shape and then select the hyperlink from the shortcut menu. So there we go. Let's open window, come back to our original drawing and let's draw out one more hyperlink circle icon and this time we're going to use the sub address feature. We will browse to the other page, LAN, and let's say we don't yet know the name of the shape so we'll leave that blank for now. We'll click OK and then click OK and then let's go on over to the LAN shape let's back off our zoom to the page level and let's say we want to link to the little guy over here, this router. You remember how we did that, right? We went to tools, options, advanced and made sure that we're running Visio in what's called developer mode and then to get the name of the icon, we right click the icon, come down to format and then special. Looks like switch is the name of this icon. I'm going to select it and do a control C to copy that word to memory and then let's come back to our original page and edit this hyperlink. If we right click that selected shape, we have the edit hyperlink option in the shortcut menu and we can now come in here to sub address, click browse and paste in that name. Let's click OK and OK and we've got ourselves a hyperlink. Let's resize that really large just for the heck of it. And to fire it we can right click, come down to LAN switch and we've got ourselves a working hyperlink. Let's finish this discussion by removing the hyperlink. Let's say we wanted to keep this shape for another reason, but we wanted to remove the associated hyperlink from it. We would right click the hyperlink shape, come to edit hyperlink and then we would simply come down to the middle of the hyperlinks window and click delete. Once we click OK, we should find now that when we hover our mouse inside that shape it's no longer associated with a hyperlink. And yes, you can create your own hyperlink icons. These ones in borders and titles aren't particularly special. They just have some programming logic attached to them such that when you drag one out onto the drawing page it automatically invokes the hyperlinks dialog box.